2023 Monthly Recap: April

A pretty slow month in the sewing room.  We were blessed with a week of summer weather so I spent a lot of time outside enjoying the sunshine instead of cooped up in my sewing room.  It was so nice to walk without a sweatshirt and get on my bike for the first time this year!  I'm working on my summer plans and looking forward to both more of the nice weather and some relaxed sewing.

Quilt Tally
WIP List at beginning of month: 12
WIP List at end of month: 11
Untouched in 2023: 4
Active QAL Projects: 2

Quilts Finished
Black and White Kinship (July 2022)

Quilts Started
None!

Quilt Progress (4 WIPs touched)

Scrap Cabinet - This quilt will be made up of twelve sets of ten blocks each, or 120 blocks total.  I completely finished two of the sets, plus made six more, for a total of 26 blocks.  This is my new leaders and enders project, but it's moving much quicker than I expected!

Sew Place Like Home - The Wicked Witch and all of the border blocks are finished!  Only one more month to go on this quilt-along!

Under the Sea - I finished the mermaid block that I started last month and pieced the narwhal block.

Blocks made for my memory scrap quilt.

Miscellaneous Accomplishments

Think Small! - A collection of small project accomplishments for April.

My mother-in-law, who basically taught me everything I know about quilting and sewing, asked me to do a small favor for her this month.  She made a T-shirt quilt and her longarm quilter couldn't do parts of it because of "sparkles" that were part of some of the T-shirts, so she asked me if I could do them on my machine.  There were three areas that needed to be done and each one took less than 10 minutes (it helped that she told me she would take care of burying the thread ends, so I literally just had to do the quilting).  This woman once attached and hand-stitched the binding to a king-size quilt for me because the quilt didn't make it back from the longarm before my baby was born, so I was happy to do something quilting-related for her!
 

I was trying to both match the style/spacing of the longarmer's meander and not run over any of the sparkles.  We agreed that only someone who was looking to nitpick would notice the difference.  If you are wondering, yes, I did hit one sparkle, and yes, it did break the needle, but it was an old needle that really needed to be changed anyway, so not a big deal.  It wasn't in this part of the quilt - imagine one of those tiny sparkles on a metallic silver background and you can see why it happened!

Next Month's Goal

Only one more month before school is out and I'm keeping it easy: finish the Sew Place Like Home  quilt!  I've got it in my head that this one will be sent out for quilting, so it's just a matter of making Toto, piecing the top, and then binding it.  I'll also be working on a new pattern at the same time that I hope to release by the end of June so it will be a busy month!